Better freedom with a crust, than slavery with every luxury.
Satire is an abuse of wit. It corrects few evils.
Resentments, carried too far, expose us to a fate analogous to that of the fish-hawk, when he strikes his talons too deep into a fish beyond his capacity to lift, and is carried under and drowned by it.
A strong will deals with the hard facts of life as a sculptor with his marbles, making them facile and yielding to his purposes, and conquering their stubbornness by a greater stubbornness in himself.
Wit, like poetry, is insusceptible of being constructed upon rules founded merely in reason. Like faith, it exists independent of reason, and sometimes in hostility to it.
Wit never appears to greater advantage than when it is successfully exerted to relieve from a dilemma, palliate a deficiency, or cover a retreat.
If it is a distinction to have written a good book, it is also a disgrace to have written a bad one.
The reveries of the dreamer advance his hopes, but not their realization. One good hour of earnest work is worth them all.
He must put his whole life into his work, who would do it well, and make it potential to influence other lives.
Words, like cannon balls, should go direct to their mark.
Very handsome women have usually far less sensibility to compliments than their less beautiful sisters.
A woman’s love, like lichens upon a rock, will still grow where even charity can find no soil to nurture itself.
The finest compliment that can be paid to a woman of sense is to address her as such.
Wit is better as a seasoning than as a whole dish by itself.
We take life too seriously: the office of wit is to correct this tendency.
The questions most furiously discussed are those which have in them a basis of truth, and yet a large admixture of errors. We inconsiderately take hold of, and mistakingly support or oppose them, as either wholly true or wholly false.
We repose too much upon the actual, when we should be seeking to develop the possibilities of our being. It is true of nearly all of us, that what we have done is little compared with what we might have accomplished, or may hereafter effect.
Within the sacred walls of libraries we find the best thoughts, the purest feelings, and the most exalted imaginings of our race.
The cause of laziness is physiological; it is an infirmity of the constitution, and its victim is as much to be pitied as a sufferer from any other constitutional infirmity. It is even worse than many other diseases; from them the patient may recover, while this is incurable.
By his provocations to good-natured merriment, a humorist of the first water contributes as much to the sum of happiness as the gravest philosopher.